Abstract idea of Song instead of pure file management

[Jeff Mitchell]

Cody Christensen wrote:
> I'm sorry to jump in on a thread that appears almost dead and I won't claim to 
> comprehend every one of the posts as some of them are complex and detailed 
> but...
> 	I would like to bring up my idea that I discussed briefly on this list 
> earlier this year.  That is the idea of a spell checker type interface.  I 
> believe that Amarok 2 will ship with a helper program used for the advanced 
> AFT (sorry don't remember exactly what it is called) What if the feature was 
> implemented so that only the dead sure entries were automatically associated 
> and any other "Advanced" association was handled through an extention to the 
> helper program that already exists.

I don't quite follow what you're saying, but I don't quite think you
understand what AFT does.  AFT is used to track files (not songs per se)
so that as you move them around, they remain playable within Amarok (as
well as updating the statistics, lyrics, etc. associated with that file).

This is separate and complementary to the idea of song correlation,
where the primary features are to identify duplicate tracks (possibly at
different bitrates/formats) so that algorithmically the best one is
always played (for instance), and so that statistics/lyrics/etc. can be
kept per song, regardless of which actual file is in the statistics
database.

This is complementary to AFT but can't necessarily replace it, as basic
non-embedded AFT does not require any interaction from the user at all.
 Interaction is only required if they want to have more robust tracking
that does not have some of the corner cases associated with the
non-embedded kind.  Song correlation will always require interaction*,
and there are also people who will not want Amarok to perform this
correlation, so cannot be an "enabled by default" thing.  In addition,
although some functionality could be augmented by both,  there is some
completely different functionality: song correlation is nice, but if you
move the files around, the playlist still won't be able to play them
unless you have AFT to tell it where the files are now located.

--Jeff

*I say always because all of the proposals so far require a (slow)
scanning process of the entire file, possibly followed by a rewrite of
the entire file if it is storing information in tags.  This is too slow
to be put upon every user during a scan of their library (even if it is
only slow the first time), so will require users to explicitly enable it
(either through adding the information with an external program, or
perhaps with a script within the Amarok UI).